Can you see the sun if it doesn’t reflect light?

John Loftus and I have now completed the manuscript for God or Godless and I can say it was the most fun I ever had writing a book. (And I have fun writing books so that’s saying something.) I also think it may be the most important project I’ve ever worked on. (Admittedly depending on how you view the projects I’ve done previously that may not mean much to you.) In the crowded landscape of theism/atheism books and theism/atheism debate books in particular we have done something that is fresh and unique. Of course I will keep you apprised of publication details as they become available.

For now however let me ease myself back into the pool, so to speak. It’s been a few days since I blogged and the gears are a bit rusty (maybe they’re rusty because I’ve been putting them in that metaphorical pool. That’s what happens when you mix metaphors. You get a big mess. At least I didn’t mix a “gas in the tank” metaphor with a “stoking the fire” metaphor. That would be disastrous).

Anyway, I digress.

In the comment thread for “Life is a concentration camp so why are you smiling?” I observed:

If I find an object that appears to be of human artifice I can identify its meaning by discerning its purpose. If t [sic] wasn’t created by a mind then it has no purpose and thus no objective meaning. Mutatis mutandis for creation and all the things that fill it including you and me.

Jag Levak then quoted an excerpt from that statement: “If it wasn’t created by a mind then it has no purpose and thus no objective meaning.” And from there Jag asked this question:

“Do you think your god was created by a mind? Do you think your god has any purpose, value, or meaning apart from what he has given himself?”

Ray Ingles liked the question ernough that he asked me to respond to it. While my gears are rusty from time spent in the pool I’ll do my best.

First the easiest part: no God wasn’t created by a mind. In fact, the way a Christian defines the term God that is an incoherent question. It is as if Jag is asking whether the ground of all explanation has a ground of explanation. More remotely it is like asking whether there is a person at the party taller than the tallest person at the party.

Uh, no there isn’t.

Why would Jag ask the question? My guess is that Jag thinks I’ve tripped myself up, presumably because Jag thinks I’m committed to a proposition like this:

(1) For any entity to have meaning or purpose that entity must have been created by a mind.

And from there we can reason as follows.

(2) God wasn’t created by a mind.

(3) Therefore God doesn’t have meaning or purpose.

So reading between the lines I’m guessing that Jag wants to force something like (3) on me. And insofar as I wouldn’t want to accept (3) I find myself with a dilemma.

This dilemma, like Jag’s initial question about God being created, trades on a fundamental misunderstanding of what we mean by the term “God”. He treats the concept of God as if we were positing merely another thing. But the concept of God is invoked precisely because God is not merely another kind of thing. Hopefully this will come into further clarification as we proceed.

First, it is true that God doesn’t have any created meaning or purpose. Qualified appropriately, (3) is trivially correct. I referred above to an artifice, meaning  “a skillful or artful contrivance”. In other words, something which is designed for an intended purpose. Hammers were designed for a purpose and when they are used for that purpose they are used well. If human beings were also designed for a purpose then they can also be “used well”, that is their lives can be lived well, when they live in accord with that purpose. But a rock or a stick which was not created for any purpose at all cannot fail to be used in accord with its objective purpose since it has none. And the same is true of human beings. If we have no objective purpose then we cannot fail to live in accord with the objective purpose we lack because we were not designed for anything.

This isn’t a problem for God because God is not a created object with an imbued purpose. Rather, he is the ground, seat, origin of the objective, intrinsically desirable values that we seek to live in accord with to actualize properly the various purposes we’ve been given.

We might make this clearer by revisting and retooling (1). Here it is again:

(1) For any entity to have meaning or purpose that entity must have been created by a mind.

Now here is the expanded and clarified version:

(1′) For any contingent entity to have meaning or purpose that entity must have been created by a mind with a particular meaning and for a particular purpose.

 Since God is not a contingent entity this doesn’t apply to God. God is not designed for anything. But that doesn’t mean that God lacks meaning and purpose. On the contrary, the relationship between God’s meaning and purpose and our meaning and purpose is analogous to the relationship between the sun’s light and the moon’s light. Remember, God is not like another object. From a philosophical perspective we posit the concept of God precisely as something different in kind — necessary rather than contingent for example — because an adequately rich picture of the world requires that we do so. (I discuss this at much more length in God or Godless by the way.)

With that in mind, let’s retool the argument with that suggestive solar analogy so as to bring out how wrong-headed it is:

(4) For any entity to be visible that entity must reflect light.

(5) The sun doesn’t reflect light.

(6) Therefore the sun isn’t visible.

I trust it is obvious where this argument goes off the rails! Interestingly the notion of objects reflecting vs. generating light is directly analogous to objects reflecting vs. generating meaning. God is to meaning as the sun is to light.

And this leads me finally to an appropriate concluding quotation from the indefatigable C.S. Lewis in his brief “Meditation in a Toolshed”:

Everything else was almost pitch black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

          Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.[1]